Evan Spiegel

At 21, Michael Dell was already running a company making about $60 million a year. Guy Raz says that was just the beginning for Dell Computers. A college freshman turned a dorm room side hustle into one of the biggest computer makers in the world. While he was supposed to be in college, the dorm room business was already thriving: he bought computers, souped them up with more capability, and resold them. He advertised and bid on state contracts, and he does not really remember how he figured the work out.

Back in the 1980s, before people used the word startup and before founders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, or Katrina Lake, the dorm room story people knew was Michael Dell's. Today

Evan Spiegel says glasses will not replace the smartphone. He does not think computing is moving beyond the phone. The smartphone, he says, is going to play maybe the most important role of legacy technology.

What he wants from glasses is a way to bring computing into the world. Computing has been isolating for a very long time. Growing up, he loved computers and built his own, but using one meant the computer lab at lunch while his friends were on the schoolyard. Phones continued that trend, pulling people into the screen instead of helping them share an experience with friends.

See-through glasses go the other way. Two people can sit across from each other and play chess, design somethin

Evan Spiegel did not like the idea of Snapchat streaks, did not want to do it, and fought very hard over the years to kill streaks. Snap has always been anti-metric: no metrics. The objection is a user-facing metric, which is separate from gamification and from an internal count. Almost no metrics show up in Snapchat, and a metric is hard to find. Most social services show how many friends you have, how many followers you have, how many likes you have, and a metric on comments. The experience should not be looking at a bunch of numbers. Snapchat should get out of the way and help people communicate with their friends.

For years he kept trying to get rid of streaks. What changed was learning

Evan Spiegel says Snap can build a totally new service with half a team member's time and distribute it through Snapchat. Distribution is getting more important because artificial intelligence tools make it easier to build companies, build software, and innovate, which puts a real premium on distribution.

People will move resources away from software engineering and toward distribution so they can grow faster. A brand has a hard time getting visibility and traction, so Snapchat is becoming a more valuable place to grow a business, and that reach is a defense as other work gets easier. Snap has always had more ideas than people to build them. Spinning up a new app used to mean sparing 15 peo

Evan Spiegel says independent studies his company did not fund or join show Snapchat has a positive impact on people's wellbeing and relationships, while TikTok and Instagram are negatively associated with wellbeing. He puts the count at maybe three or more: one out of Australia, one out of the Netherlands, and one in the US.

Snapchat is built around communication with friends and family. Relationships are the number one predictor of positive mental health outcomes and of the ability to recover from a negative depressive event, so positive outcomes for a service oriented around real friends do not surprise him. A challenge is getting people to understand Snapchat's role as a communications

Evan Spiegel says the real danger in rules for kids, teens, phones, and social media is a blanket policy, because everybody is different. In the general view, adults can do what they want with phones and social media. Kids differ in development, in what they are passionate about, and in their interests. Parents need to cultivate a healthy balance and do what is appropriate for each child at different times.

Flynn, his 15-year-old, went back and forth between his dad's house and their house a lot when he was younger. Without a phone it was otherwise impossible to coordinate. Spiegel and his wife decided to give him a phone earlier than they maybe would have otherwise, and earlier than Spiege

Evan Spiegel says Snapchat had to separate social from media because combining them was the biggest mistake, and the mix creates perverse incentives. People should add the friends who are close, use the service for messaging, and share stories with them when they want to. Content to watch can come from publishers and creators instead.

He puts that decision around 2016 or 2017. Very early, Snapchat opened to publisher content and content from creators, so people could watch that once they ran out of posts from close friends, rather than being pushed to add more friends. Snapchat moderated that content and was one of the first companies to rank it with AI, in a service called Discover.

The p

Evan Spiegel says Snapchat captured well over a trillion selfies in a year. He remembers Apple announcing about 500 billion selfies on the iPhone in a year, or something close to it, and that figure sounded strangely small.

He sent a message to the Snapchat team. They came back with well over a trillion selfies captured on Snapchat over the same period. Snapchat had low-balled the figure it announced publicly. John Collison put the count at about a thousand selfies per monthly active user, against almost a billion monthly active users. He first guessed a lifetime total. Spiegel said the trillion was over one year.

People do not realize the scale and the engagement in the Snapchat camera.

Evan Spiegel says Snap will not invest in camera glasses because they are not 10 times better than the phone, and a new idea that misses the bar is not worth building.

Snap built camera glasses more than a decade ago and learned the limit the hard way. Hands-free point-of-view video while kayaking looked exciting, and getting the camera out of a pocket felt like a real opportunity. The phone already covers the job. A person kayaking can pull out a phone and make a great video, and a hardcore user can put a GoPro on their head. Camera glasses sell today for low hundreds of dollars, maybe 150 bucks or 200 bucks. Willingness to pay is very low and the market is quite small. A hit still would n

Evan Spiegel says more than two-thirds of new code at Snap is written by AI. The shift happened really quickly, and the rate at which the models are getting better is extraordinary.

AI is transforming software development across every part of Snap. Snap is a software business with network effects: a service that connects people to one another, and at its core still a software business. The way Snap writes software and runs the business is changing dramatically.

Snap is insulated from some of the effects on other software businesses that AI is cannibalizing very quickly. The network that connects people stays in place while the way the software gets written changes underneath it.

Evan Spiegel says Snap Spectacles matter most for experiences that did not exist before. Snap is investing most of its time there, and the excitement is not replacing the television on the wall.

He estimates a lot of the large-screen use cases move first. Specs can carry a huge television almost anywhere, which undercuts paying thousands of dollars for two or three televisions at home when lightweight glasses can show any size screen. The same shift applies to a desktop display or a laptop, and it is valuable when traveling. Screen-based use cases are probably the clearest example of what moves. The desktop is still the best for word processing, and still the best for information retrieval